Succession ended in May 2023. In the years since, it has become impossible to watch a prestige drama without seeing its fingerprints. The show did something that the industry is still processing: it found a way to make audience sympathy structurally impossible while generating compulsive engagement, and it did it through the specific grammar of corporate power. Power as the medium through which people harm each other. Wealth as the insulation that makes harm invisible to the powerful. Family as the vector through which all of it gets personal.
What Succession Actually Did
The show's achievement was formal as much as it was narrative. Jesse Armstrong and his writers created a world in which the audience understood, intellectually, that these people were doing terrible things — and felt, emotionally, something close to affection for them anyway. That gap between understanding and feeling is where the show lived. It is also, not coincidentally, where actual corporate culture lives.
The Shows in Its Shadow
Industry (Sky Atlantic/HBO) is the clearest inheritor of the Succession tradition — the same commitment to depicting work as a moral environment, the same refusal to distribute sympathy evenly, the same understanding that financial markets are not merely the backdrop for the story but the story's actual subject. Industry's third and fourth seasons have been the most coherent articulation of the post-Succession corporate drama format. The Regime (HBO) attempted a political version of the same formula with mixed results. Presumed Innocent applied it to legal drama with considerably more success.
The International Version
The Succession influence has crossed language barriers more cleanly than most American formats. Money Heist creator Álex Pina's new series — a Spanish corporate drama set in the fintech sector — has been the most critically successful European response to the Succession model, and its second season has generated the kind of conversation that luxury streamer acquisitions usually only manage in English.
“Succession made boardrooms feel like the most dramatic places on earth. It turns out they kind of are.”
— FACE Arena TV
What the Format Demands
The corporate drama genre has specific requirements that the Succession template has codified. The ensemble must be large enough that moral responsibility can be distributed and contested. The institution must be powerful enough that its internal politics have external consequences. The writing must be comfortable with moral ambiguity: nobody good is too good, nobody bad is too cartoonishly bad. And — the element most shows get wrong — the work must actually look like work. Characters in the best corporate dramas make decisions that feel professionally specific, not generically dramatic.
- ·Industry Season 4 (Sky Atlantic/HBO): The best current corporate drama on television.
- ·The Bear (FX/Hulu): Applies the same formal intelligence to the restaurant as workplace.
- ·Presumed Innocent (Apple TV+): Legal drama with genuine corporate underpinning.
- ·Painkiller (Netflix): Healthcare as corporate horror story.
- ·The Dropout (Hulu): Real-world Succession narrative executed with uncomfortable fidelity.
The Essential Watch List
If you haven't seen Succession: watch it. All four seasons. Then watch Industry. Then decide whether prestige television has ever been this good at depicting how power actually works.
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